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Milky Way Revelation: Through a glass darkly

We live in an urban area on the East coast of the US where light pollution prevents us from seeing all but the brightest of the objects in the sky, but we wanted to photograph the Milky Way. A light pollution map indicated that much better (but not perfect) conditions existed on an ocean beach we frequent a few hundred miles south. We used the Stellarium website to determine when and where we could see the Milky Way and rented a room facing that direction. We stayed seven nights, but six were cloudy. On our last night, the sky was finally clear and we got this shot.

Milky Way before processing

While this was better than we could see with the naked eye (20 second exposure, ISO 3200, f/2.8), it was not what we had hoped to see. However, we knew that astrophotography pushes a camera to its limits and post-processing is required. Working with Lightroom, we were able to transform the above photo to one which we feel provides a more complete revelation of the Milky Way.

This is a lovely photo. What a wonderful trip that must have been. Are you planning to go to see the total eclipse of the sun in August? We have family in Nashville and we’re going there to see it because the Nashville area is in its path.